In IBM Connections one of the most used options is Activities. A great way to manage and organize information and to do’s around a common task. Especially when using in combination with the Kudos Boards Add-in from ISW which makes it one of the strongest and most used features of IBM Connections (yep a shameless plug, but seriously, it IS the best Add-in for IBM Connections and if your organization isn’t using it you should definitely take a look at it) .

However, Activities also has it’s challenges…

Working for a customer on creating some documentation I found the following.

In Community Activities you have the option to limit what community members can do and you can even assign specific rights to specific community members. Great! But…

Another login… yes seriously I now have well over 200 different logins for sites, for companies, for whatever…
It is hip to be connected and hip to give your customers that feeling of being appreciated by giving them a personalized and password protected 24/7 connection to your company. No need anymore to send letters, lets just get ourselves a portal and have our users look up their own information there, they will love it! and why we’re at it: why not add a form for users to submit their own tickets. Heck we can even eliminate that expensive helpdesk that way!

Yes, you get it, I am getting fed up by that whole ‘(exceptional) web experience’ thing. Okay, in a lot of situations having the options to get information directly and without having to call or wait for office hours is good but… I think we’re going overboard.

One of my biggest frustrations with being an adoption consultant for IBM Connections is that apart from it being very hard to get good insights into what’s happening in the platform, it is even harder to set up corrective measures or actions based on that information.

Cleaning up inactive communities for instance. Every environment has them and every user gets annoyed by it when they keep finding communities that have no relevance anymore. At the same time, IBM Connections itself puts no pressure on community owners to clean up so they forget or simply ignore and the situation continues. After only a few years, most organizations will have dozens, if not hundreds or thousands of such inactive communities. Continue reading Making IBM Connections actionable

As most of you know I’m very passionate about IBM Connections as an Enterprise Social Network. I love how it puts people central and allows organisations to foster and expand their users collaboration. However, it also has certain things that can or should be improved. In the past there was an IDEAJAM site where ordinary users, customers and business partners could suggest or vote on ideas for changes, additions and improvements but unfortunately that was discontinued. Leaving very few avenues for ordinary IBM Connections users to leave their ideas.

This has now changed. With the site https://connections.ideas.aha.io everyone now has the option once more to suggest ideas for improving IBM Connections or to vote for ideas suggested by others. So what are you waiting for?!? This is your chance to help IBM understand what is needed to keep making this product great. Let’s all take that chance and make ourselves be heard 🙂

It’s summer and that means that news is sometimes announced during a period while people are about to go – or just coming back from holiday. This happened to me when ConnectionsExpert 2.0 was released just before I went on holiday. Which meant that I wasn’t able to share my excitement over its inception as much as I would have liked to and that’s also why you are now reading this blog post with a few weeks delay. Don’t worry though, my excitement over this release is still the same!

So what’s ConnectionsExpert?

For those that don’t know, ConnectionsExpert is a tool from panagenda that allows you to gain deep dive information about the health status, usage and adoption rates of your IBM Connections environment by collecting and displaying key metrics and monitoring information about the platform and its usage. As a team we’ve been working hard to further expand the features of ConnectionsExpert and that has resulted in this new release! Continue reading ConnectionsExpert 2.0 released!

I admit freely that I’m still learning every day when it comes to how best to visualize data and that means that I look at other visualization much more in detail than I would have done in the past. There are many best practices around how to visualize data and when a data visualization doesn’t keep to them I can’t help but go into analyzer mode (yes, even my own and I’m in no way perfect!).

Two weeks ago I was at SocialNow conference in Lisbon and was honored to have a short session on ‘social analytics’. The conference has quite a unique setup in that it is completely based around a fictitious company called Cablinc which is thinking of implementing an Enterprise Social Network. All speakers address the conference as if they are presenting to the company trying to either instill knowledge as a ‘consultant’ or get them to buy their product as ‘vendor’. Several speakers and vendors are invited around various topics and they are provided with information about the Cablink company as well as specific use cases they could use in their presentation.

As this is quite a different approach to what I would normally do I decided to really go ‘analytics’ on this challenge of talking social analytics as one of the ‘Consultants’ and build Cablinc a dashboard around the theme “What does Cablincs current usage of mail & file storage facilities say about the need for implementation of an ESN?“…

Two weeks ago I returned from Las Vegas and due to personal circumstances I wasn’t able to post my opinion on the event sooner. So a bit late but here are my two cents on a few days in Las Vegas!

This was the first time for IBM to combine the former Connect event, focused on IBM Collaboration solutions, with all the other events of other IBM brands into one massive 4 day event. With thousands of visitors (estimated numbers ranging from 23.000 to well over 30.000 according to various people I spoke), hundreds of sessions on a wide variety of topics, two impressive conference locations (MGM Grand and Mandalay Bay) and a showcase floor that could easily encompass several football pitches, it was indeed massive. Granted, that scale also caused some challenges and problems but overall I must say I really loved it…!

My blog has been really quiet the last few months for which my apologies. It’s one of those times where I simply don’t have time to blog nor the topics to blog about. But as there were a few things noteworthy lately I figured it’s time to do an update blog now. Continue reading Upcoming events & the IBM Champions program

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Femke Goedhart – Business Consultant

Anything and everything that strikes my interest and makes it into writing. Focused on Social Business, Analytics, Data visualizations, Content Management, Social Media and my work as a business consultant, sometimes on other topics that float by.